Long ago, as I went from occasional cook to a more devoted cook, one of the first challenges I found was cooking a good steak. I started out cooking really bad steaks but with the help of Julia Child's writings and other resources, I've (almost) perfected several styles of steak cookery. However it seems that as soon as I arrived at this point, beef prices went through the roof. The once or twice a week variety of cuts became much more expensive, so that they became viable only once or twice a month.

So now occasionally my mind turns to the culinary equivalent of the old alchemists' dreams of turning lead into gold. Knowing what I know about the characteristics of the cuts that that I like, could I not deconstruct pieces of lesser cuts, apply what I'd learned about cooking real steaks, and somehow construct a hybrid super-steak?

Well , not as of yet.

My first attempt was almost as instructive as it was amusing. The cheaper chuckeye steak has always been a welcome stand-in for a 'real' steak at our house. It's much less expensive, responds to cooking much the same way as a ribeye, has all the flavor, but, alas, is not quite as tender.

Okay, I reasoned, we just need some sort of extreme tenderization process. We want the meat to just fall apart when a knife comes anywhere near it. Thus it came to be that a chuckeye steak was uncerimoniously introduced to the whirling blades of a food processor. The result? Meat paste. Now that's tender (Bwaa Ha ha ha...!).

But a little bit too amorphous.. so, the blob was packed into a ring mold and then put in the freezer for 20 minutes to let it firm up a tad. Now, time to give it the standard tenderloin treatment - cast iron skillet - directly on gas grill set on 'kill' - infrared thermo confirms surface temp of 765 degrees F. Time to sear. One minute on each side and then into a 425 degree oven to finish for a few minutes. Let rest, and voila....

....meat styrofoam.

The seasoned seared crust was actually quite promising, but it was absolutely hollow. Under the intense heat, the insides had shriveled, contracted and left an unpallatable void within. An interesting result, but nowhere near success.

After some weeks of reflection, I decided to give this dead horse another whack. This time I reasoned, I'd reverse the process and go to the other extreme. So I again obliterated a perfectly good chuckeye steak in the Cuisinart, but his time formed the paste and froze it. Now with the shape preserved, I cryovac'd it in the FoodSaver. Then dropped the bag into 135 degree F water for an hour or two. The gentler sous-vide cookery would let the, um, mess come together before searing. The result was more successful I guess, if I was going for a burger. It wasn't good, but it appeared to be the starting point for a possibly good burger. But not a steak.

I've not given up yet, but I think this basic method is not on the right track. Instead, I think it would involve careful microbutchery to arrange fibers and fat in just the right fashion - then perhaps compressed into a long tube from which steaks could be cut. Perhaps a binder named something like mono-gluto-golly-mate would be needed.

So, anyway, there are two paths that are dead-ends. But I still think that there's gold down one of the many paths that FrankenCookery might point to.